Orthopedic surgery often requires the infusion of a slurry comprised of blood and crushed bone into a surgical site to promote healing and recovery after an injury. The crushed bone in the slurry is ground and pulverized from a larger bone specimen using a bone grinder that reduces the larger specimen into crushed bone particles. Bone mills allow patients to have their own bone particles implanted when there is a preference towards using an autograft to alleviate the possibility of rejection or infection at the surgical site. The surgeon can utilize the bone particles and the resulting slurry to repair bone defects and perform bone augmentation.
Existing bone mills are large, expensive devices which are cumbersome to use and clean and further require re-sterilization at the end of each procedure. Such re-sterilization takes the form of expensive and time consuming gas sterilization or autoclave sterilization. In the case of gas sterilization, the nature of the sterilization process makes the bone mills available for use only once in a 24-hour period. When using an autoclave sterilization process, the bone mills can be sterilized and available for reuse in less than a 24-hour period, however, the bone mills are not immediately available. The resulting period required to re-sterilize the bone mills nevertheless increases the time which necessarily passes between procedures, thereby decreasing operating room and surgical efficiency. Further, the porous nature of blades commonly found in bone mills facilitates the retention of bone particles. The blade porosity hampers the effectiveness of the cleaning process, which furthers the possibility of contamination during subsequent use of the bone mill.
Moreover, existing bone mills are typically powered devices that require an external means for driving the mill, such as a pressurized air source or an electrical motor. Additionally, existing mills may only have the capability to produce a single size of crushed bone particles. As such, a surgical suite needs to have multiple devices to provide crushed bone at different sizes, which greatly increases the cost of having bone-milling capabilities. Otherwise, a surgeon is disadvantageously forced to use crushed bone having a size either too large or too small for a particular surgical procedure, resulting in potential difficulties during an orthopedic procedure.
It is therefore desirable to have an inexpensive bone mill which is easy to sterilize and can further be adapted to create bone chips of different sizes. It is also desirable to have a bone mill which can be manually operated without the assistance of external power sources.